Empire of the Iguanadons

Leave your political correctness at the door.

Spam

49 filthy spammers have been caught to date. Bastards.

As of today, this is what Akismet has done for me. That's 49 comments I didn't have to delete. 49 spammers I didn't provide backlinks to. 49 headaches I didn't have to deal with. And 49 comments the captcha system failed to block.

So I'm going to remove the captcha from the comment form. I want to see if I get more varied spam or if the bot attacking me is just one lone voice in the crowd. I suspect Akismet is better than any captcha. I'm probably also asking for a deluge. But hey. I've never shied away from an internet fight :P

BTW, Kiasyn, if you're reading this, strongly consider making this a native feature! Wordpress 2.x has it already.........................."It is pointless to resist, my son." -- Darth Vader
"Resistance is futile." -- The Borg
"Mother's coming for me in the dragon ships. I don't like these itchy clothes, but I have to wear them or it frightens the fish." -- Thurindil

Well, it's certainly easier to add comments without the captcha, but what about Kiasyn's comment on mudbytes about it being a pretty weak captcha to begin with? What if we, rather than removing the captcha altogether, added in a stronger version of it (as well as keeping the akismet, that is), might that eliminate all the spam for you, or at least reduce it even further, even more easily?

Finding a captcha that's easy to work with and effective at the same time won't be easy. I'd be inclined to use something as strong as the one in QSFP and we all know what the human failure rate on that is.

Akismet gets very high marks from anyone who uses it. Some blogs with far more traffic than I'll ever see completely removed their captchas and boast about how they get thousands of spams, with no leakage. Damned impressive.

I've found out there's a Net::Akismet module in CPAN which might do the trick. Providing it's easy enough to decipher the mysteries of Perl. The bonus is that installing it on the server gives everyone who implements the hooks access to it.

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The Imperial Guard has expelled 10612 filthy spammers from the Empire. Bastards.